Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
And they want to take away your Bibles, too! Do people actually believe this slop?
No, that is the problem with unions, no one believes what they do and how they go about achieving their goals. As a union member if you want to pay 'protection money' to your union that is your business. The mafia worked that way too, but unions have made it legal.
The UAW has made one concession after another to the auto companies in light of unfortunate circumstances that the companies and their poor decision-making management teams were important contributors to.
I have no doubt that poor management decisions were made at the auto compaines. However, what goes unsaid is that a lot of talented managers just don't want to work for a union-shop that is bogged down in work rules, etc. Does anyone think Google or Microsoft would have taken off if they'd been union shops? I don't.
What was even worse was that both of their unions sold out the younger members' benefits for greater benefits for themselves. While they were not personally responsible for this, they did agree with it. They felt it was fine to mortgage others' futures for their own gain.
This exact scenario is now playing out in the public sector. Most Baby Boomers will get their pensions and the young folks will have theirs frozen or eliminated completely. The unions will cry and play victim and wonder why the young folks think unions are worthless. Duh.
Your assertion that unions promote getting rid of slackers is indefensible, at least in the public sector. I've seen it first hand. In the public sector, it's almost impossible to get rid of someone unless they've committed a crime. I've seen people get fired, but it takes a lot.
One guy where I work got caught looking up a gal's dress and taking pictures with his cell phone. That was big time sexual harassement. Another gal had mental illness issues, and would never show up for work. She wouldn't even show up for her hearing. That's when they finally got rid of her.
But bad attitude, incompetence, or poor performance? People in the public sector almost never get fired for that. I had a supervisor from hell who should've been fired many years ago. They put him in the place where he could do the least amount of damage. Unfortunately, he was my supervisor for 4 years. Even the ardently pro-union folks agreed that he should have been fired and that he would have been had we been a non-union shop.
Ah, another lovely personal anecdote and testimonial, this one in cavalier disregard of at least the Fifth Commandment. Unions in fact do not have power sufficent to steamroller the interests of management, and neither side has any incentive to undermine the companies that provide a livelihood to them all. Unions in fact have every incentive to cooperate in assuring that the best and most promising employees are promoted and that slugs and slackers are indeed fired. Which is why they do that. A situation in which the condensed and consolidated power of management is set against the puny power of an individual worker is not a level playing field. Unions put the interests of workers on the same level as those of management, allowing the two sides to negotiate agreements that serve all of those interests, not just some of them.
Don't know where you have been most of your life, but if you think unions don't steamroll management, you need to wake up. Tell that to anyone involved with GM and the United Auto Workers, and the list doesn't stop there... Obama has favored unions and presently is trying to push a bill to make bidders on Government contracts disclose political contribution, however, unions are exempt from these disclosure laws.
LOL. In one contract negotiation that I am familiar with the union received virtually everything that it asked for, because the company could not afford to shut down its 24-7 operation.
Well, apparently it could more easily afford giving the union "everything that it asked for", which might be a the more salient point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JustPassinThru
Another funny. The union strike against the Los Angeles Herald Examiner cost at least one life, 1300 jobs, and 350,000 subscribers. The paper was never able to make a comeback and closed 12 years later.
Which you of course attribute to union greed. Workers do not authorize their unions to call a strike just for the heck of it. Workers lose thier jobs and much of their incomes during strikes. Strikes are a last resort, turned to when all other means of reaching an equitable agreement have failed. For example, what was the wage rate in 1967 for reporters at the LA Examiner as compared to the LA Times or as compared to Hearst's own SF Examiner? Had the LA Examiner kept pace with other dailies of it size in investing in modern plant and equipment or was the workplace and technology being allowed to rot into total disrepair? And why did Hearst let the thing drag on for ten years? Did the Hearst Empire even care? Did they bargain responsibly at any point at all? On any issue at all?
Quote:
Originally Posted by JustPassinThru
Just the opposite is true. The slugs force the company to hire more workers, and the union receives more dues.
Again, management does all the hiring. The union gets to deal with the results. Why is management hiring all these slugs? What's wrong with them?
Quote:
Originally Posted by JustPassinThru
In my experience with four union locals in four different industries, and also as a shop steward, three of the locals were corrupt, and negotiated contracts the helped the companies. In return, the union received additional funding of the retirement plan. Since employees weren't fully vested for ten years, and the management insured that there was a high turnover of employees, the union pocketed most of this money.
What were the particualrs? How did the union pocket the money? We want facts and details, not more shady allegations via personal anecdote.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JustPassinThru
In an experiment, one union allowed me to negotiate with the chairman, president, and executive v.p. of a large corporation...
To answer your last sentence, yes, I do think unions look the other way, thereby allowing mediocrity in workers. I believe this because I've seen it happening. I've seen union workers tell a new guy to slow down because he was making the rest of them look bad.
LOL. I've been TOLD that. Then again, it was half tongue-in-cheek and I was in my 20's and these guys were in their 40's and 50's. To use a baseball analogy, if you throw 98 mph and get brought in to put down an eighth-inning rally, you throw 98 mph for as long as you can. If you get converted to a starter, you do not throw 98 mph in the first inning.
Production schedules are not meant to be set at just short of super-human levels. They are meant to be set at or near a point where a marginal increase in output is not offset by marginal decreases through such things as sickness, injury, disaffection, alienation, and ultimately turnover. The folly of short-term thinkers who would run a machine at break-neck speed and then replace parts as they broke, while running people at the same sort of pace and just discarding them when they broke was demonstrated a long, long time ago. Maybe the news hasn't reached you.
I have no doubt that poor management decisions were made at the auto compaines. However, what goes unsaid is that a lot of talented managers just don't want to work for a union-shop that is bogged down in work rules, etc. Does anyone think Google or Microsoft would have taken off if they'd been union shops? I don't.
The question dealt with concessions, and the unions made decades worth of them in attempts to help cover for the ever-growing mess of things that management had made. Despite the idiotic right-wing meme, the Big Three were not brought to their knees by greedy union workers who would not face up to reality.
What do you think would be different at Google or Mcrosoft if more of their employees were represented by a union? Are yu suggesting that these companies have achieved their positions in part through exploitation of workers?
This exact scenario is now playing out in the public sector. Most Baby Boomers will get their pensions and the young folks will have theirs frozen or eliminated completely. The unions will cry and play victim and wonder why the young folks think unions are worthless. Duh.
Did you expect something different from electing a handful of antisocial Tea Party Republicans whose maniacal mission is to eliminate organized-everything? There is your "worthless" group. There is no economic reason why federal, state, or local government worker benefits should be gutted or eliminated, whether those workers are represented by a union or not. Maybe you should keep in mind that all you actually come to own in an Ownership Society is MORE RISK! Need some of that, do you?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Union vs Non-Union
